2014-09-06 1:07 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 1:48 PM, John Mark
Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
IMO the WMF should stop focusing on English
Wikipedia as a target
deploy site, and stop allowing its product management team and WMF
staff in general to be salesman for it - it is scaring the community
that all WMF staff seem to be so heavily vested in this 'product' as
the salvation of the wikis.
This is rank hyperbole.
The MediaWiki deployment train delivers new software to all projects every
week. One stage is to non-Wikipedia projects, which actually get new
software *first.* Then in a second stage is for all Wikipedias
simultaneously. So the default behavior for rollouts, if all you do is
merge your code and wait, is that English Wikipedia gets basically no
special treatment..[1]
Now, for larger feature rollouts like VisualEditor or MediaViewer, the
testing stage and eventual launch set their own special schedule. We have
used English Wikipedia as a testing ground a lot in the past, which is
natural when you consider a variety of factors.[2] That doesn't mean we
haven't worked hard to test things out with non-English projects. Some
examples:
I am sure you have tested things out on various wikis, but I can confirm
that seeing things been rolled out from a non-English wiki, they multiple
times look like if the English community has requested it or has been
copied from. One (large) example is the TemplateData part of the
VisualEditor which seems to us (nl-wiki) copied from the English Wikipedia,
in multiple ways. This is not how we work with templates.